Merry Christmas 

Merry Christmas

It’s the 23rd of December around 3pm in Chirpan Bulgaria. It will be my first Christmas away from my friends and family. Oh well that’s part of life, and it’s not the end of the world. I will miss most of all, Christmas Eve at Grandma’s house. That is always a highlight of my year, and a wonderful time to spend with family. I will be spending Christmas with a few Peace Corps buddies in Chepelarie, a small mountain town near the ski resort of Pamprovo. I will spend the week in Chepelarie then travel to Sofia for new years. It should be a lot of fun. My kindergarten students made me a strange branch with yarn, popcorn, pumpkin seeds, and other decorations all over it. Apparently if you hit people with it on new years you will have good luck for the following year. I went to the Municipality Christmas party last night. It was quite interesting, they drew names and made people compete in strange contests like Hammering nails into a board. It was kind of funny watching 5 middle aged Bulgarian women trying to hammer a nail into a small piece of wood. I was selected for the cake eating contest, they made me pick a girl to feed me the cake and then it was a race to devour the slice. I felt like I held my own but was demolished by a beast of a man named Evegini. Evegini (head of the city council) has a head the size of a basketball is taller than I am with has hands that dwarf mine, he has the body type of a grizzly bear. It was a lot of fun and I got a laugh when some of the guys started chanting U.S.A…..U.S.A.
It is definitely starting to feel like Christmas around here, the ground is covered with snow and all around the town you can see Christmas lights and other holiday decorations. Work at the municipality is great, at this point I am just getting to know the people and beginning to gain trust and acceptance. They seem to like me so I feel I will be able to accomplish many things in the future.
I have tried a few new food items lately. Pig ear: it tastes a bit smoky with a barbecue type taste, but it’s basically a piece of fat with thin cartilage. It is also a bit difficult to chew.
Shark fin soup: I had this at a Chinese restaurant yesterday in Stara Zagora. It was a great soup and was only $1.40.
Wow it’s been 4 ½ months only 22 ½ more to go. Well I miss you all and wish I could be with you this holiday season. Christmas will definitely not be the same without friends and family. I will post some pictures online so you all can see what I have been up too lately. Thanks a lot for the packages you have been sending. The winter Cloths have helped out quite a bit. It’s been extremely cold here the last couple weeks. I only have one radiator style space heater, so things aren’t all that cozy and warm at the pad. Well I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Love
Trevor Lake

Winter in Bulgaria

Dear friends and family,

Things in Bulgaria seem to be moving very fast, it feels like just yesterday that I was drinking beer and eating a hamburger in my backyard surrounded by my friends and family. Well Thanks to technology I feel like I am still connected to you all and that makes things for me quite a bit easier. So thanks a lot for the emails, it has been a great reassurance of the large network of love and support I have in the States.
I played my last rugby game of the season in Sofia a couple of weeks ago. We played the game in 2 inches of snow. The snow slowed the game down quite a bit because we couldn’t really feel our fingers which made ball handling a bit challenging. Thanksgiving was not quite the same for me in this neck of the woods. My thanksgiving dinner consisted of Bulgarian style taparamen and a few Sausages. But the following weekend I met up with a few of my friends and we had our own belated thanksgiving dinner. LSU graduate Michael el Koubi made us all some wonderful duck and goose gumbo, which was delicious and apparently very popular down south.
I wish I had some more exciting news for you all but things here have really slowed down and the reality of a slow paced winter is beginning to set in. My work situation has been pretty much a disaster from the beginning. I kept waiting for the clouds to part but it never happened so I was forced to initiate some changes. To make a long story short, my counterpart made a few financial mistakes, and my NGO ran out of funds and is no longer operateable. So After some patience and a lot of heavy thinking I contacted my Peace Corps Program director and had him set up a meeting to have all my work responsibilities transferred to the local municipality. On Thursday I will have a meeting with my PC COD director, and the mayor of the city and we will discuss my new role and job responsibilities working for the city of Chirpan.
I have spent the last month or so adapting to my new community to the best of my ability. I have made a few friends and am feeling more and more comfortable in my new community. The old women who lives underneath me is very kind and often helps me with small things such as setting up mouse traps and teaching me to hang my laundry properly. I have been teaching English at two kindergarten classes every Tuesday and Thursday. My little pupils are very bright and a joy to teach. Everything here is going farely well. The locals still stare at me, but they are getting used to my face so I think that will eventually change. A small article was written about me today in the local paper describing the new American volunteer in town. Despite my work troubles in the last few weeks I have been doing great here and have been enjoying this new and exciting experience. The good times have definitely been outweighing the bad.
Many thanks to all of you that have kept me updated by emails and have supported my endless ramblings on this blog. To the Lake family: (especially Gramps) I am sorry to here About Rich, He was an amazing person who lived a very full and wonderful life. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to develop a relationship with him over the years and to have seen him shortly before he passed.
Trevor Lake